


One Small Burn

by Queue



Category: due South
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-27
Updated: 2010-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-14 03:56:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/145079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queue/pseuds/Queue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Mea maxima culpa for the godawful schmoop. Also, warning: no character death, major or otherwise (I wouldn't do that to y'all - or to myself), but one major character's injury forms the spine of the story.</p>
    </blockquote>





	One Small Burn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pearl_o](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pearl_o/gifts).



> Mea maxima culpa for the godawful schmoop. Also, warning: no character death, major or otherwise (I wouldn't do that to y'all - or to myself), but one major character's injury forms the spine of the story.

When Ray woke up, Fraser was asleep, laying all still and precise on the bed. Typical, Ray thought, unfolding his creaky-kneed self from the “comfortable” chair in the corner and wincing as various joints reminded him he’d passed 40 a while back. Even bandaged and taped, Fraser was carefully tidy; even injured, he was so self-contained it practically hurt to look at him, unless you knew where to look to find what lay under the stillness.

Ray cracked his neck hard, left and then right, the noise amazingly loud in the early-morning silence of the ward. Funny, he hadn’t had that habit before Fraser and his backpack walked into the 2-7 bullpen all those years ago. Then again, before that day he hadn’t had a lot of things – wolf hair on his upholstery, encyclopedic secondhand knowledge of First Nations legends, a leather fetish, the biggest queen-sized bed in Chicago. Not to mention a lover who was also a partner and a nutcase and, let’s not forget, fucking addicted to danger. Though you’d never guess that last part from looking at him lying there now, weirdly quiet for Fraser and all scraped up like a kid who couldn’t quite get the hang of his first bike. Knees, forehead, elbows – and the cracked ribs for extra, courtesy of the stumble into the wall he’d taken when the stairs had gone out from under him there at the very end.

And one small burn, right along the top of his cheekbone.

It was the burn that did Ray in, that sent him to those creaky knees by the side of Fraser’s hospital bed like someone in a film he wouldn’t have let Fraser drag him to on a bet. He’d always figured losing it like that was something people did for the effect, to make themselves look good in some weird chief-mourner way. He hadn’t known that sometimes losing it like that happened without the person’s permission, happened because the person suddenly figured out that the incredible good luck staring them in the face could so easily have been something different and much, much worse, and that at times like that staying upright stopped being all that important and just breathing more or less took over. Times like now.

Ray’s breath hitched a little, but he got it under control, there by the side of Fraser’s bed, close enough to hear Fraser breathe in and out, a little raspy but mostly fine. After a while he realized he was breathing when Fraser did, which he thought was kind of sappy but who cared, really. And a while after that Fraser’s breathing changed, just a little, and the hand with the IV in it lifted and came down with gentle precision on Ray’s hair. Ray’s breath hitched again, and then they were both still, together.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Pearl_o, 6 October 2004, for her first-line-of-fic meme.


End file.
